Treading on Thin Ice
by AriaAdagio
Summary: A short MerDer piece taking place between Wishin' and Hopin' and Walk on Water that explores Meredith's feelings about the doubts her mother has instilled in her and Derek's apparently off screen habit of being everywhere and saying things.


**Author's note: This story is meant to segue out of Wishin' and Hopin' and into Walk on Water. It's implied in the show that Derek and Meredith have a lot of meaningful conversations, for instance, in the beginning of Walk on Water when she complains of him always being there, saying things, and in the middle of Sometimes a Miracle, when Derek yells at Ellis Grey for things she's said only to Meredith, but we never see these deep discussions on screen. This is my attempt to give some more depth to the Mer/Der relationship while staying as close to canon as possible.**

* * *

Derek sat waiting for her as she exited the elevator onto the first floor of Seattle Grace. He had parked himself on one of the chairs in the main waiting area to the side of the entrance. His arms were slung over the backs of the chairs to his immediate left and right, and his knees jutted out diagonally in a relaxed cowboy pose. He smiled as she stepped into his field of view, but didn't stand, instead leaning further back into a slouch.

She walked over to him. "Hey," she offered lamely as she took a seat beside him.

His color didn't look quite right, probably remnants of the toxic blood scare from earlier in the day. She looked at him with a sigh.

"You were right," he said without preamble. An impish grin crept across his face.

"About?" she asked.

"Your mother," he said. "I let it get personal, and she blind-sided me. I'm sorry for snapping at you earlier. I was in a bit of a mood."

She shrugged. "It's okay."

He turned, his gaze searching her face, his eyebrows furrowing. "Are you all right?" he asked.

She laid her head on his shoulder and gave another heavy, torso-shaking sigh. "She's gone again."

He frowned. Shook his head in a little windshield wiper motion. And then he snaked his wrist over her shoulder, and she found herself enveloped in his arms. "Mere, I'm sorry," he whispered into her hair.

They sat in silence for a few moments. He rubbed a palm along her back in slow, calming circles. She breathed dully against his chest, trying to take comfort in the warmth of him, but everything felt cold. And wrong.

Why couldn't she ever get used to this? This thing with her mother… This awful, sick, painful thing. Her mother had been ill for what seemed like forever, now. She should be used to this and not let herself get all twisted up inside. And yet, the more she thought about it, the more it hurt.

Her mother wielded daggers with every word.

Stab. Ordinary. Stab. Disappointment. Stab.

Stab. Stab. Stab.

The logic that the vitriol was because her mother was sick wore thinner every time. Every time. The more she heard the same hateful things, over and over, the less Meredith believed it was random synapses having a bad day, and the more she believed it was a pattern rooted in truth.

Stab. Stab. Stab.

Her eyes began to burn. She sniffed and wiped at her face with her hands.

"Are you ready to go?" she asked, suddenly not wanting to be there another minute. Not one more.

He squeezed her shoulder. "Sure."

With a sigh, she stood up. He followed suit, wobbling slightly.

She raised an eyebrow, reaching out with her hands to steady him. "Are **you** all right?"

Derek gave her another one of his lop-sided smiles, but his gaze looked careworn and tired. "I'm fine," he said.

She leaned down and picked up his briefcase from the seat beside him. He reached for it, but she dodged a step and held it away from his grasp. His hands, suspended in the air for the briefest of moments, shook ever so slightly.

"No," she said, watching him with a practiced eye. "I'll carry it."

He didn't offer any protest. When she turned to leave, he trailed a few steps behind her.

She thought of her home waiting for her. Her big, soft bed. The desire to crawl into it and sleep forever became overwhelming the more she thought about it, but… Something about it seemed wrong. It seemed wrong to stay in a house that was hers only by her mother's misfortune, wrong to stay in a house where so many things used to be her mother's things, things that her mother had touched, things that her mother had loved, when she had still remembered what made them significant, at least.

"Derek, do you mind if we go to your trailer tonight instead of my house?" she found herself asking as they passed through the doors and into the night. There had been a light drizzle earlier, and the blacktop of the parking lot had an oil-slicked, thin sheen of moisture all across it.

She stopped. The air was pleasant, but damp. A balmy wind kicked up the tails of her coat and brushed its fingers through her hair. It still smelled like rain.

His hands came to rest on her hips. "Of course not, why would I mind?" Derek asked as he leaned over her shoulder and kissed the side of her cheek. It was a soft, chaste kiss.

She shrugged.

They hadn't stayed at Derek's in a long time. He had sort of unofficially moved in with her. They'd never discussed it. But, suddenly, he was staying over almost every night. They'd started commuting to Seattle Grace together when their shifts matched up. His things were in her bathroom. The medicine cabinet over her sink wafted with the faint scent of his aftershave. He had sequestered a drawer in her dresser for his clothes, and sometimes she stole sweaters out of it when he wasn't looking. Several of his coats were in her hall closet. She'd started getting a few of his magazine subscriptions in the mail. And somewhere along the way, after it had all become a normal thing, she'd noticed, and she'd smiled. It was nice. Really nice, in a way that their relationship before Addison had come into the picture had never been, when he had still carried all of his overnight things in a leather briefcase, and there'd been no sense of permanency.

But he'd never moved a lot of his stuff over beyond the necessities. He didn't really have much to begin with. He wasn't all that materialistic, and he seemed to think her company was the most important thing to have. But the trailer itself was certainly his. And she wanted to be surrounded by things that he loved, that were significant to him. She wanted to stay on the land that had splashed such a glowing, carefree smile across his face when he'd said he had no idea what he wanted to do with it, as if the indecision was half the fun. She wanted to wake up in his arms, in his bed. Away from everything else. It was suddenly more important than anything else she'd ever wanted.

"Mere, seriously, are you okay?" he asked again, breaking her from her musings. His voice rumbled into her neck, low, and soft, and luscious, but she resisted the urge to lean into it.

"I don't know. I just don't want to go home right now."

"Did you have a fight with Izzie or something?" he prodded as he came around to face her, though he never stopped touching her.

"No."

"Did your mother… Did she say something?"

"I just don't want to go home, Derek," she snapped.

His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

A lump formed, thick and painful, in the back of her throat. She swallowed. "I don't want to be around anything that reminds me of—" Her eyes began to burn again. "I just want to go to the trailer." The trailer where he was just Derek. Where he kept his fishing poles and hiking boots and other Derek things. "Please, can just we go?"

He cocked his head to the side and regarded her. The skin around his eyes twitched. He almost looked like he was going to protest, but instead he exhaled long and slow and said, "Okay, Mere."

It wasn't a victory. She could tell he was just deferring to a better time to talk, like a pestering gnat that would come back the second your back was turned, but she wilted with relief anyway, her limbs going lifeless, almost hard to use. Putting it off was good. She didn't want to discuss it right now. She didn't really want to discuss anything.

A series of emotions she couldn't identify traveled across Derek's face, but none of them looked short of troubled and tired and other bad things. Great. So she was starting to infect the people around her.

She turned and continued walking, pretended not to notice Derek's heavy sigh behind her. A sigh that said he felt like crap, and he knew she felt like crap, and that everything was just crap right now. Stopping to agree with him and lament would just make it take longer to get to the trailer. Where she could sleep, and the only sounds for miles would be Derek breathing next to her.

An ambulance siren flared, shrill and startling, somewhere behind her, making her wince. She pulled a thin finger to her temple and drew circles with it across her skin. Anywhere but here, anywhere but here. The words pooled in her head and filled, and filled, and filled until she was swimming in them. Drowning. Gasping. Anywhere but here.

They arrived at the car after what seemed like an eternity. Meredith found herself shuffling like an automaton toward the passenger side. She tossed her bag into the back seat along with Derek's, and, off in her own little orbit of the world at large, was pulling the seatbelt across her lap before she noticed something was wrong.

Derek sat, hunched and uncomfortable, behind the steering wheel, gripping it at the eleven and one o'clock positions so fiercely his knuckles were a bloodless shade of white. His forehead rested at twelve o'clock, and he trembled. Just slightly. Like a person with a bad caffeine buzz who was trying to sit still, but just couldn't quite manage it. The door to the car still hung open, and he hadn't drawn his left leg up into the cabin yet.

"Oh," he said, followed by a set of rapid swallows. "I really don't feel that well."

"You said you were okay!"

He didn't answer, just sat there, breaths coming in short gasps, face pale and growing slick with beads of sweat that gave his skin a glow under the sharp overhead parking lot lights. For the briefest of seconds, she was mad at him, mad at him for prolonging things, for interfering with her sudden compulsion to get away, but she pushed back the bitterness with sheer force of will. She wouldn't let her mother ruin this. Ruin this thing she had with Derek. She wouldn't. Her mother could poison what she wanted to, except this. This thing, whatever it was, was off limits. This was her haven.

Hers.

She unbuckled her seatbelt and walked around to his side of the car. "Lean back," she commanded.

He did, putting his index and middle fingers to his neck as he did so, but she swatted at him. "Stop trying to be a doctor," she snapped. His hands fell to his lap.

She put the back of her palm to his forehead. "You have a moderate fever. Do you feel nauseated?"

"No," he said. "Dizzy." He blinked at her, but his eyes were glassy, like he wasn't quite seeing her.

She felt his pulse at the juncture of his neck and cheek. Everything seemed normal.

"Move, Derek. You're in no shape to drive."

He nodded and half slid, half fell out of the seat with a groan. She caught him, clawed desperately at his arms, somehow managing to slow his descent, but as tiny as she was, she couldn't really do much more than prolong his ride to the ground. He went down to a crouch and then finally to his butt on the cold, wet pavement.

"Derek…" she said, growing a bit more worried that he remained silent. "Did you want to go back? We can put you on oxygen again…"

He took a few breaths. "Yeah. Yeah, I... Oh." He looked at her for one panicked second, his eyes flaring wide. His entire torso hitched violently and his hands flew up to his mouth, but they did little to stop his last meal from dribbling out through the cracks between his fingers. And then he made a weird, low-pitched, whining sound of distress that made her world fall away.

"Not nauseated?" she said, an eyebrow raised, trying to ignore the lump that was reappearing in her throat with a vengeance. She reached forward and pulled his handkerchief from the front left pocket of his coat. It was a simple white cotton thing, no special monogram or design or anything. She'd asked him once why he bothered anymore in the age of Kleenex and baby wipes, but he had just shrugged and said it was a habit. She felt grateful for it now as she dabbed at his mouth and chin while he sat there, glassy-eyed, panting, and miserable.

"Yeah, well, I wasn't when you asked," he growled as she pulled the soiled handkerchief away. "Thanks for the jinx." He leaned back against the car, thunked his head against the side, and squeezed his eyes shut.

She let him sit for a moment, hoping he might recover enough to move off the ground on his own. She pulled his hands up and wiped those off too, surprised at how little he was protesting. He'd never really been sick before, not in the time that they'd been together. She'd somehow expected him to be a bad patient. One of those people that questioned everything you did and refused to do anything you said. But he was downright docile.

Or, maybe, he was just so miserable that he wasn't really thinking much about anything else. Her heart tore a little at the thought.

"Still dizzy?" she asked.

He nodded. His eyes remained shut.

"Shouldn't this have worn off by now? Everyone else seemed fine."

"Don't know," he said.

She frowned. It really wasn't like him to be so… reticent.

Maybe he was just more sensitive to the toxin? Everyone had reacted differently. George had been pretty bad off, but Alex, who'd been in the OR with the woman for a prolonged period, hadn't seemed much the worse for wear after he'd woken up.

She looked back at the hospital, trying to ignore the pangs that the sight brought her. It was dark. Sitting on the cold pavement like this couldn't be doing Derek any good. She would suck it up. She would.

Be a trooper or whatever.

"Come on," she commanded. "Put your arm around my shoulder."

With a gargantuan effort that had them both panting and coughing like they had just climbed Everest, they managed to get him upright and leaning on the side of the vehicle. Derek ran a shaky hand through his hair and looked, pained and pale, at the distance between the car and the hospital. "Let's just go home, Mere."

"Are you sure?"

He didn't answer.

"All right," she said, making a command decision. "We'll take it slow."

By the time they made it back to the free clinic, they were both shaking from the effort. The clinic was dark and quiet and still, far from the bustle she'd seen earlier. Everyone had all gone home for the day, and the clinic was only staffed during regular business hours. It looked cold and empty.

Stab. Disappointment. Stab.

"Mere," Derek said between pants.

"Sorry," she said, giving her head a little shake, and she began to trudge onward. They shuffled together, only tripping up once on a stray instrument tray, to one of the gurneys, which Derek sank onto not unlike a pile of rocks.

He groaned and brought his hands up to his forehead. "Remind me never to do surgeries on toxic patients again. Never."

"I could," Meredith said as she lifted his legs onto the gurney. "But I don't think you really mean it."

He sighed, eyes closed. "No, I guess I really don't."

She flicked on the bedside lamp. It snapped and buzzed before finally settling into a steady, dull, white fluorescence. The light made Derek look ghastly. His face was a pale taupe shade. Dark, fleshy circles hugged the skin under his eyes. Stubble that had grown in that day gave his skin a dark, shadowed cast along his cheeks, chin, and throat.

She left him for a moment, walking over to the small hand sink. She picked up one of the small plastic cups that sat in a stack beside it, filled it with cold tap water, and brought it back to him along with a bowl. Handing him the cup, she allowed herself to collapse into the wheeled chair beside the exam table. He curled up like he was doing a sit-up, pressing his left elbow behind him to hold himself upright. She held the bowl out in front of him. He swished the water around in his mouth and spat it out with a grimace. She took the bowl and the cup from him and put them on the instrument table nearest.

"Thanks," he said, breaking the long silence.

"Wait until you see the bill," she said. She tried to put a smile in it, but couldn't quite manage one.

He raised an eyebrow and grinned at her. "I won't tell Izzie we wasted supplies if you won't."

It wasn't a waste, she wanted to say, but didn't.

She put her hand on his shirt. It was soft and warm and inviting between her fingertips. He stared, saying nothing. For a vague, interminable second, she met his eyes, and her breath caught hard in her chest. The lamp buzzed, soft in the relative silence, and they breathed. Together. In and out. She licked her lips and looked away, flustered at the sudden rush of blood to her face. When she looked back, he lay there, eyes half-lidded and blank, everything about him utterly relaxed except for the slip of a grin that pulled his lips into an upward curl. It was a look that simply screamed, you're better than morphine, babe.

She pulled one of the oxygen tanks from the bed adjacent to them over to the bed where Derek lay. She turned on the air and placed the mask over his mouth. He reached up for the straps and pulled them around his head.

While he relaxed, his eyes open in little slits, she set up a slow saline drip to replace the fluids he'd lost. "Good stick," he mumbled under the mask, which fogged with his words. "Barely felt it."

She brushed his forehead with her fingers and sat with him, just sat. The moments ticked by. She found it unexpectedly peaceful. To be in the hospital, but not really, not a part of the living, breathing, bustling entity. The clinic was quiet and dark. She watched the fog claw in and out, in and out along the plastic of the breath mask in time with the rise and fall of Derek's chest. His breathing slowed down gradually and evened out. His face relaxed even further, his eyes sliding shut somewhere along the way, and she felt like she could identify the exact moment the last scrap of suffering slipped out of his features.

"You asleep?" she whispered. It had been a half hour. He hadn't said anything in that time, and he didn't offer any input one way or the other now.

She took a deep, cleansing breath, but it didn't help. The words began to fall from her lips, almost without her bidding. "She did, Derek. She did say things. And I—"

And then she started to cry. It just happened, really. Like a dam breaking or some other stupid cliché. She didn't want to be the person that just broke into tears. Didn't want to be the depressing bundle of emotions that belonged in a sewer they were so dank and dour. But she was. She tried to be quiet about it. Tried to let him rest. To let him be the one who got comforted, for once. But the ugly words kept pouring out of her like dirt and debris sluicing off a roof in a rainstorm.

"She told me I was a disappointment to her. That I was no more than ordinary."

The world blurred and twisted in front of her like an Escher painting. Each time she blinked she made it worse. She rubbed her eyes with her hand, but it didn't help. Nothing ever helped. Why did she have to be fraught with such emotional poison. Why did she always have to be the one that cried? It made her feel stupid and silly and weak.

Something warm touched her knee. She looked down to see Derek's right hand giving it a squeeze. Derek pulled the mask down off his face. "Now, that is a bald-faced lie, Meredith. You couldn't be ordinary if it hit you with a stick."

"You were awake?" she asked, feeling oddly betrayed and oddly relieved all at once.

He shrugged as much as his position would allow and gave her a thin, partial smile. He rose up on his elbows, grimaced, and then let himself fall back to horizontal with a frustrated sigh. Meredith moved to put the mask back on, but he swiped her hands away.

"Mere," he began. "Being a surgeon at all is far, far from ordinary. You had to work your ass off to get here. You have to work your ass off to stay here. I don't see how anyone could ever think you're ordinary."

She shrugged. "She's upset that I haven't picked a specialty. She thinks I have no focus."

"Another gross misstatement, Meredith. Picking a specialty is like buying a house. It's a big investment. And you don't want one that you'll end up hating. It's really okay to take your time picking something. No shame there."

"But," she protested, suddenly feeling every bit of her mother's words like torture, writhing in her chest, squeezing, pressing… Like some thick, noxious thing that didn't belong there, parasitic and awful. "I don't even have a clue."

Stab. Ordinary. Stab.

Her mother was right… Surely, she should have at least an inkling by now? A hint. Something that said, this is what Meredith will be. This is what Meredith will become. This is what makes Meredith. Here you are, Meredith. Here are your blueprints.

But she felt hollow.

Stab. Stab. Stab.

"You'll get one, Mere," he said, his voice harboring a certainty that she had never understood. Why did he have such faith in her? What made him so sure when she had nothing but all-consuming doubt? Maybe it was just him being Derek, always sure of himself, always knowing the answer… But somehow, she wasn't so sure that was it.

"How did you know you wanted to be a neurosurgeon?" she asked.

"Well…" He blinked, eyelids fluttering. Coughed a little.

She frowned. "I'm sorry. We shouldn't be talking about this when you're, well, like this." Way to go, Meredith, her inner-voice spat at her.

"Yes, we should. I'm fine. I was just thinking…"

"You don't look fine to me, Derek."

He ignored her. His gaze shifted to something far away, some time, some place. A little smile appeared as he relived some distant memory. They'd never really talked much about his experiences prior to Seattle Grace. It was sort of forbidden 'Addison' territory that they simply never breached, a kind of unofficial don't ask, don't tell policy that they were both happy to oblige. But now she found herself curious. Curious about the things that had happened to make him the Derek she knew.

"I remember scrubbing in on a surgery," he began. "I was an intern. Mmmm, not so far along as you, but close. A little boy, I can't remember his name at this point, but he was about five, and he had what was supposed to be an inoperable tumor. I'm sure you know by now that the brain is incredibly complex. A lot of it is still a complete mystery. But due to a cutting edge technique used by my attending at the time, that boy ended up cancer-free. I liked how neurosurgery seemed to always be evolving, always breaching new ground. And I wanted to be a part of it. For instance, a broken spine ten years ago versus a broken spine today, or a broken spine in the next ten years? Different ballgames entirely. It's fascinating."

She tried to picture him, ten years younger, new and green as she was, witnessing such a life-defining event. An event that had told him, this is you, Derek. In a few years, if you work hard enough, this is you. She'd never felt anything like that. But was it because she didn't know what she wanted of the available choices, or because she genuinely wasn't ready to want anything that badly?

"I don't know if that's for me," she said. It seemed like the safe answer. She hated to think that she might be a surgical wallflower, twenty years down the line still not knowing what the hell she was doing with her life, flitting here and there, not particularly excellent at anything. But maybe that was what she was destined for. Maybe she was happy with the ordinary. But if she was, why was she so twisted up inside? So unsure…

"It doesn't have to be. But you do show a talent for it."

"I--" she found herself saying, but the word bled away into silence. She looked at him and saw nothing but that strange certainty he always seemed to have that she always seemed to find herself longing for.

Stab. Disappointment. Stab.

"You do, Mere. Don't let your mother make you think otherwise."

She looked down at her lap. "It's hard to, sometimes. To not believe her."

"I know," he said. His face looked deep and serious. Like he really did know. And for the first time, it struck her that he'd never told her what her mother had said to him. Only that it'd put him in a mood. She inhaled, about to ask him what'd happened, how her mother had poisoned him, when he coughed, his pallor going sheetrock white.

"Okay, talking stops," she snapped, reaching for the mask that now rested, unused, on his chest. "This goes back on, now."

He gifted her with a gorgeous, full-on smile, one that reached up and crinkled the skin around his eyes. She melted, just a little. She paused with the mask for just a moment, noticing that his color had come back very quickly this time.

"Slave driver," he teased, but he didn't shoo her away when she put the mask back on.

"I bet you like being pampered."

Like a petulant child, he pulled the mask down again. "Only when it's you. Do I get kissing therapy?"

"Derek!"

"Just asking. Because I like kissing."

"Well, we'll see how you are in an hour."

"A whole hour?"

"Don't make me sedate you."

He gave her a look that said with a mock-woeful gaze, "Okay, I'll be good."

She snorted.

"You don't think I can be good?" he asked, giving her a soulful, puppy dog look. "I'm hurt."

She shared a gaze with him. He smiled, hopeful, longing, and she thought about all the crap they'd been through together, apart, and between.

"I wish I knew how to be as cocksure as you," she whispered.

"Mere…" he began, his voice trailing off. "I'm going to tell you a secret, because I love you, and it's obviously something you need to know."

She raised an eyebrow as he gave her a conspiratorial grin.

"I'm as confused as you are most of the time."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously, Mere."

Silence ticked by. She stared at him for a moment, and suddenly the horrible pressure she'd felt lifted away. She inhaled. The sharp scent of antiseptic hospital hit the back of her nose and trailed down her throat. And then her eyes began to burn and she started to cry again. She started to cry, but it was the kind of crying that was liberating instead of cloying with misery. Tension shivered down her limbs and evaporated. And she shook, and shook, and shook.

He sat up and pulled her off the chair into his arms, whispering words of comfort that were garbled in the din of rushing blood and breathing and sobs. She didn't care. They felt good to hear anyway.

"Stress sucks," she managed to say between gasps.

He rested his chin on her head. "I know."

"Thank you."

"Do you want to go home now? I really am feeling better."

She felt his hands running through her hair. Felt the warmth rushing along his skin, the purr of his breathing in his chest. There was a scratching sound of tape being torn and a following thunk as Derek threw his IV needle in the biohazard bin. Then he lifted her up, and she was being carried to the car before she had a chance to think of an answer.

Balmy, wet air caressed her cheek as he walked her out into the night. The rumble of thunder pulsed along the sky over their heads, but no rain came.

"Home please," she mumbled.

And he took her home.


End file.
